Here’s a brave little confession: I like the Trump doodles. They’re better than good, they’re very good. They’re charming. They combine winsomeness with a faux-naif gravity. The bold but not simple composition is enlivened by resourceful surface design to create active miniaturized dreamscapes of the city as a child might wish it to be. One imagines if Donald had taken a different path. The world deserves well-designed placemats and post cards; he could’ve done some good stuff.
Trump says he’s never drawn anything (“I never wrote a picture in my life,” phrased that way because he’s a doll). But drawn he has. Some of his doodles were auctioned for charity, as he’d know if he kept up with his reading—check out Trump: Never Give Up: How I Turned My Biggest Challenges Into Success by Donald J. Trump with Meredith McIver. Now his habit’s in the news because of the Epstein scandal. A signed note was found in a tribute volume belonging to the notorious Jeffrey Epstein, rapist of underage girls. The signature, apparently Trump’s, is described as doubling for the pubic hair in a picture of a naked woman, with the picture encircling the note. The public hasn’t seen any of this; reporters for The Wall Street Journal did and then wrote it up.
As quoted by the Journal, the note’s phrasing is mysterious and cockeyed. The only absolutely clear points are that it’s friendly, it’s addressed to Epstein, and it involves secrets, with these being shared between Epstein and the note’s writer. Possibly the secrets involve age, a topic that pops up toward the end: “Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?” This cluster of points looks enough like a confession of shared pedophilia that Trump and MAGA are hollering fraud. “Does anyone honestly believe this sounds like Donald Trump?” tweeted an outraged J.D. Vance.
Admittedly somebody setting out to write a note that sounds like Donald Trump wouldn’t write the specimen found in Epstein’s book. So maybe it wasn’t written to sound like him. Instead of being a bad imitation, it’s Trump himself reveling in a tender emotion. No wonder the thing sounds so different from the usual Trump, and so bizarre. The note has something unique, a hushed air of cloddishness like two twilit figures meeting to compare dick size. I say only Trump can produce this note. The other time came with his brief appearance in Ghosts Can’t Do It (1989), Bo Derek’s attempt at a comeback vehicle (no word if her guest star advised on the title). John Derek’s dialogue, Jeffrey Epstein’s friendship—both spoke to a hidden part of Trump, an aspiration to soulfulness like Jack Skellington’s aspiration to the Christmas spirit.
I wouldn’t have thought Trump could write that note. His turn in Ghosts Can’t Do It took me by surprise too. But at least the performance and the note are crappy: insufferably rapt and removed and at the same time moronic. The note’s big message: Look at us, we have a secret. The secret to everything. For pomp the bit opens with a voiceover, like in the movies. Then the camera lingers as the two men arch their eyebrows and smile cryptically. And it turns out (one hears) that the secret in question is merely a high-end consumer experience. The experience is rare and hard to obtain because it’s so brutal to the people who are being used. But it’s still something rich men can buy when they want a good time.
This is a chump’s idea of what it’s like to see deep and experience life’s mysteries. But those doodles… maybe Ivanka did them and he just signed. That could mean she drew the naked woman as well, but the Trumps are their own sort of family.